Muli Bwanji! We made it to Namitete! After the long travel adventure we were happy to arrive at the guest house near the hospital that we will be staying at until June. Although none of our baggage made it with us we were still grateful for the wonderful house and beautiful scenery!

Our Humble Abode

Today was our first day of work at St. Gabriel’s Hospital! We went to morning report to start the day after which we got a tour of the hospital from Dr. Mbeya, the hospital director. We got to see all the grounds and meet a lot of the nurses and medical officers working there. At eight in the morning the hospital was already packed with people in the outpatient clinic and the antenatal clinic. The culture shock definitely started to hit as we were walking through the hospital. Although St. Gabriel’s is a fairly large and well-run hospital for this area, I couldn’t help but think about how it was so different from what I’m used to in the U.S. After the tour, Dr. Mbeya introduced us to the some of the people who will be helping us with the technologies. We were introduced to the head nurse who we talked to about the HSA Community Healthworker Backpacks and DataPall. After some more touring of the hospital we made a new friend! Isabel is a sister that lives on the hospital grounds and it was her first day of work at the hospital too which bonded us immediately, also because we pretty much have the same name.

The Principal Nursing Officer then took us to the Palliative Care Unit to do a quick check up on DataPall. We met some of the nurses that worked with the team last summer at St. Gabriel’s and they were all excited to have interns come back. Everyone has been very nice and accommodating so far, I’m very thankful that we’ve met some great people already!
After work we decided to go see Namitando, which is a small village adjacent to the hospital. The culture shock continued as we walked through the market and surrounding neighborhood which mostly consisted of wood huts and some brick structures. The people there were very excited to have us, especially the children! They would follow us and yell “azungu!” or “white!” People also enjoyed it when we practiced our Chichewa with them, we picked up a few new phrases from workers at the mini-mart.
Tomorrow we plan on meeting with the Palliative Care nurses to really go over DataPall and see how it’s been working for them as well as meet with Alex, who works with the community volunteers to discuss the backpacks.

 

We leave tomorrow!  Hannah, Daniel and I will be (finally) heading out to Malawi tomorrow as part of Rice University’s BTB Summer Internships.  We are going to St. Gabriel’s Hospital in Namitete where we will spend two months introducing technologies that have been designed by students at Rice University as well as working on projects that past interns have started there.

It has started to calm down before we head out tomorrow on the long journey to Namitete, however the last two weeks we have been packing and preparing the technologies we will be taking with us.

Hannah and I were busy assembling the HSA Community Healthworker Backpacks and packing them into two giant suitcases while Daniel was building a device called Sphygmo which is a blood pressure monitor that takes measurements automatically at a set time interval.  The HSA Backpacks are filled with some essential healthcare equipment that can be taken out into the field to diagnose and treat patients.  A quick description of the backpacks is in the link below.  Go ahead and check out Daniel’s blog for more about Sphygmo (malawi.blogs.rice.edu/author/dhh2)!

http://www.rice360.rice.edu/Resources/Documents/HSA%20and%20pregnancy%20pack%20final.pdf

While abroad we will also be working on DataPall.  DataPall is a database that was developed by Beyond Traditional Borders interns at St. Gabriel’s hospital last summer.  The database allows for recording and storing of patient data in the Palliative Care Unit.  Our job is to both check up on and expand the database so that it can hopefully run on the laptops as well as the desktop computers at the hospital.  We have been learning as much as we can about how DataPall was developed and how it works with a lot of help from Kamal, one of the interns who developed it last year.  For the past week I have been studying up on how to use Microsoft Access and the ins and outs of how DataPall works.

After weeks of planning and preparation I can’t believe departure day is finally upon us!  I am both nervous and excited to see what the next two months at St. Gabriel’s has in store for us!